Nathalie Skowronek’s La Carte des regrets (The Map of Regrets), one of the winners of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, is the story of Véronique, a charismatic editor at a Paris publishing house who is found dead in the woods far from her Paris home. It is the story of the two men in her life who loved her: Daniel, her husband, her rock, her family; and Titus, her lover, her muse, her soulmate. And it is the story of her daughter Mina, left motherless at the tender age of twenty-one, fully grown but not yet mature, discovering the hidden, imperfect life of the mother she thought she knew.
Each of these people struggle to piece together ‘their’ Véronique in the wake of the discovery that there were facets of the woman — mother, wife and lover — that she hid from them all. As the quiet, gentle story is unveiled, we gain an insight into the subtlety, the moral grey areas and the paradoxes of family life and loyalty. We gradually grow to understand the conflicted woman whose death no one could have prevented, yet which has cast shockwaves through the lives of those she knew intimately.
The novel also touches upon the theme of art — its ephemerality and its eternality. Art as remembrance and as a connection with our ancestors and loved ones. Véronique, when alive, was fascinated by 19th-century Flemish artist Jeroen Herst and his delicate landscapes evoking rivers and seas. Titus, for his part, uses his documentary film about Herst to uncover and honour the Véronique he knew and loved.
Nathalie Skowronek’s portrait of a woman torn between her two lovers, unable to abandon her family nor lay aside the shackles of expectation and duty, is no less tenderly and sensitively painted. This slip of a book is quiet and melancholy, philosophical and introspective. It tackles the universal themes of loss and love in all its forms. All the while, it begs the question: What do we owe our loved ones? And what do they owe us? Can we truly know those close to us?
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.